2012-07-27

Decoupled phone number — when your number is decoupled from your wireless carrier or SIM card, you can change carriers whenever you want. Find the best service, best deal, best offering that matches your usage patterns, use your number internationally, etc. Also incredibly handy if you lose your phone for some reason.

Multi-platform — use the service from Android & iOS mobile apps, a Chrome Extension, or any modern web browser.

A UX annoyance though — the service needs to keep track of read state. Currently, for example, the Chrome extension will chime to notify me that I have a new text, and I'll reply to it from within Chrome.

Meanwhile my Android phone obliviously keeps blinking at me, telling me I have a new, unread message that I've already responded to in Chrome. It should know better.

I'm probably anomalous here, but I like to have restaurants, etc. in my local address book (which is powered by Google Contacts). So when I find one in Maps, I'd like to be able to single-click add it to my Contacts.

The Where field in a Calendar entry should autocomplete just like Google Maps. Google Now would be a lot smarter if every calendar event had location data associated with it.

Google Calendar, with no autocomplete

Google Maps can haz autocomplete

Bonus request: how to associate a "transportation method" with calendar entries? A few weeks into using Google Now, I'm finding that I drive to some things, take public transportation to others, and walk to others, and Now's suggestions are basically wrong 1/3 of the time.